Islamic State and the Easter Rising

Irish rebels lying in wait on a roof getting ready to fire during the Easter Rising, 1916 Credit:
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The centenary of the Easter Rising was commemorated in Dublin yesterday. The unsuccessful revolt of Irish Republicans helped pave the way for the breakaway of southern Ireland from the United Kingdom in 1922 and the horrible civil war.

In the phrase “Easter Rising” is contained the central blasphemy of terrorist acts committed in the name of God. What has the resurrection of the Prince of Peace got to do with trying to shoot the British out of Ireland?

Patrick Pearse, the rising’s leader, who proclaimed the republic outside the General Post Office, suffered from what Yeats called “the vertigo of self-sacrifice”. He had a homoerotic vision of the macaomh, the beautiful young scholar warrior who would die for his country – half the Irish mythical hero Cuchullain, half Jesus. The night before he was shot by a British firing squad, Pearse wrote a mawkish poem comparing the Virgin Mary’s loss of her son to his own death.

A century later, this distasteful confusion of political fanaticism with faith is even more in fashion, but nowadays in Islam, not Christianity. Among those rebels executed by the British shortly after Pearse was his devoted brother, Willie. In Brussels last week, a pair of brothers, Ibrahim and Khalid al-Bakraoui, detonated

two of the three bombs which killed 31 people.

In modern Ireland, I am glad to say, sentimentality about the murderous and self-righteous revolutionaries who helped condemn the Republic to

70 years of economic backwardness and narrow priest-domination – and the North to terrorist guerrilla warfare – is at last being superseded by a more clear-headed approach. I strongly recommend Ruth Dudley Edwards’s new book, The Seven, which dissects the attitudes of the founding fathers. The repentant IRA terrorist Sean O’Callaghan has published a brave, hostile account of the life of Pearse’s socialist co-conspirator and martyr, James Connolly.

It no longer seems so heroic to have provoked violence against a parliamentary democracy and slaughter among one’s own people, however much one may support an independent Ireland. Must it take another century before a comparable questioning of supposedly holy killing comes to dominate the Muslim world?

“A terrible beauty is born”, famously wrote Yeats. Actually, it was a terrible ugliness, and it is getting uglier.

Children collect firewood from the ruined buildings damaged in the Easter RisingCredit:
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 Why do Americans of the official classes usually want Britain to stay in the European Union? Yesterday, General David Petraeus argued eloquently that Brexit “would deal a significant blow to the EU’s strength and resilience at exactly the moment when the West is under attack from multiple directions”.It is hard to disagree with this, in the sense that the EU, with Britain departing, would lose the European power with the greatest experience of defence and security issues.

But remember that American elites – perfectly understandably – do not look at the matter in terms of British interests, but of their own. For them, the biggest concern remains management of Germany.

The knowledge that the British are around to help them with this is comforting. We are the European country most likely to convey American views to the European top table.

But the same Americans would never accept for their country the deprivations of liberty which the EU lays upon ours. Imagine Washington bowing to directives from a multinational bureaucracy in, say, Guatemala City, or rulings from a pan-American Court of Justice in Caracas. Imagine Gen Petraeus having to submit his famous “surge” in Iraq to the scrutiny of the European Parliament.

Besides, the EU is not to be confused with European civilisation, and it is not supposed to be a defence and security alliance. That alliance is Nato, several of whose members are outside the EU.

Britain could help Nato just as well – maybe better – after Brexit, if only we would put our mind to it.

David Petraeus, the former CIA director Credit:
AP

Cambridge has just pulled a little further ahead after yesterday’s heartening victory over Oxford in the league table of the Boat Race (82-79). (Yes, I write this as a Cambridge man.) It is a bit sad that this annual contest no longer attracts widespread attention.

Admittedly, the race is quite dull unless you are actually interested in rowing, or unless one of the boats sinks. But that is not the point. The Boat Race’s importance was more as a cultural than sporting event.

In the era of PG Wodehouse, it provided the one night the year when the upper classes were free to steal policemen’s helmets with impunity. It also gave British people the simple satisfaction of being on one side or the other, even though a minute fraction of the population had attended either.

When I was a boy, our gardener was Cambridge and his wife Oxford, for no discernible reason except to enjoy a contest.

The essential difference between the two great universities is that Oxford is more political, worldly, amusing and royalist, and Cambridge more truthful (except for those well-known traitors), scientific, modest and austere. There is more to admire in Cambridge, yet I suspect that more Cambridge people wish they had been to Oxford than the other way round.

The Cambridge crew celebrates with the trophy following their victory during The Cancer Research UK Boat Race. Credit:
Getty